USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 15
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Colonel Stoddard, long the commander of the valley's soldiery, constant pleader in behalf of its people, honored and beloved, one of the purest and stoutest of the frontier patriots of New England, died June 19. His death, in itself a serious loss, was to prove the greater hurt in the succession to command of Major Israel Williams, a tem- peramental man, whose orders were outrightly disregarded by the Connecticut soldiers in the valley garrisons. Their notion that only Connecticut could command them had been one of the complexities of the troublous period and now came to full flower.
Disaster followed close upon disaster as the summer advanced. An outright battle was fought, June 26th, between Colonel Humphrey Hobbs, in command of a large scouting party from Number Four on its way to Fort Shirley, and a large body of Indians under the half-breed, Sackett, about twelve miles west of Fort Dummer. There was a four- hour fight, the half-breed Sackett was wounded, and the Indians retired in silence, their way of acknowledging defeat. Such an event was a grateful variation from the succession of misfortunes at the hands of an enemy striking from under cover, in a season of prevailing sickness and of disturbance over the insubordination of the Connecti- cut soldiers.
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Doubt as to Canada's plans was dispelled by word that came to Boston and thence to the valley that Chevalier de Repentigny had been ordered by the French governor at Montreal to go to war upon the territories of New England with twenty-six Canadians and eighty Indians. Northfield took interested note of the item that Sieur Raim- bault was to be attached to the party. It assured a second visit to the region where "Rainbow" was brought near to death at the hands of an alert citizen and saved from it by those of a considerate minister- chirurgeon. It proved that he had better memory of the hurt than of the healing. By July the suspicion of his return to make use of his familiarity with the neighborhood was confirmed by the infesting of the high ground across the river from Fort Dummer by the new invaders. "Rainbow" was near to the scene of his encounter with Captain Alexander.
Without leave, Captain Loomis paid the new arrival the courtesy of withdrawing his company from Fort Hinsdell, leaving the resident farmers to their own defence. Captain Leeds, another Connecticut officer, in keeping with the prevailing code, refused to lead ten men over the Massachusetts boundary into New Hampshire. The high mark of confidence in Massachusetts to care for its own was being consistently paid by both its neighbors, New Hampshire disregarding its towns and Connecticut staying strictly within its uncordial agree- ment.
The presence of Repentigny's hundred French and Indians, sta- tioned on the plain east of the river, on ground that was within North- field's territory until the survey of 1741 carried it into New Hamp- shire, seriously threatened the entire region and promptly began to wreak destruction. "Rainbow" was its guiding genius and ambuscade his main reliance. He lay in the tall grass of Merry's meadow, when an escort to Colonel Josiah Willard from Northfield to Fort Dummer, five or six horsemen led by Thomas Alexander, passed that way, July 13th, but saved his heavy blow for another day and a larger troop. It fell the next day upon a company of recruits being led by Sergeant Thomas Taylor from Northfield to Keene by the way of Forts Dum- mer and Hinsdell.
The young commander, Taylor, needed no word of caution. Born in Northfield in 1717, in the third generation of Indian fighters, he had grown up in surroundings of constant danger and had borne his part in all the ventures in defence of the town. Moreover, there was
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fresh in his memory the bloody affair of the month before when men of his own company had met death and captivity on the ground that he was now to traverse.
Warily he crossed the levels of Merry's Meadow, watchfully he marched up the wooded bank and along the plain, and was nearing the river when from the bush in the rear and from the swamp at the front there sprang up a host of warriors, completely surrounding him. His men faced about, gave shot for shot to the enemy line which was closing in upon them and, seeing themselves entrapped, sought es- cape to the river's bank. Here there was a final sharp skirmish, under cover of which four of the men made escape. Only the scheme of the French fighter to take captive rather than to kill saved any of the others. Two had been killed and eleven were carried away, Sergeant Taylor among them. The plea of two wounded captives for their life was answered by fatal blows from Indian war clubs. The others were carried to Canada and held captive until after the preliminaries of peace had been agreed upon two months later, when they found their way back to their homes.
In the hope of overtaking the enemy and rescuing the prisoners, a large company from Hatfield, recruited at Northfield to a total of . 129 men went in pursuit, buried the dead on the battlefield and con- tinued up the valley-in vain. The tragedy stirred the commanders, Williams at Hadley and Dwight at Brookfield, to appeal to the govern- ment at Boston for such a force as would drive the enemy from the region. Colonel Dwight pleaded, "It seems to me high time for the government to exert its power and give more effectual directions to the officers posted on the frontiers-if need be, to raise half the militia of the province. I beg we may have one thousand men to drive the woods and pursue the enemy even to Crown Point."
Hardly more than a gesture was the Governor's response in an order to Colonel Porter to raise a sufficient guard out of the militia for the succor of the exposed garrison. Its value was realized at Northfield when Captain Leeds and his company of idlers from Con- necticut was withdrawn, July 22, and on the next day Captain Alex- ander's fort, well within the limits of the village, was waylaid by six Indians.
Aaron Belding, twenty-two, unmarried, a grandson of Captain Benjamin Wright, set out just before sunrise from Captain Alex- ander's fort to go to the home of his mother, just below Mill Brook.
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The Indians watched his course down the village street and as he was climbing over the ledge of rocks just above the brook, fired upon him. The shot brought him down and one of the savages sprang upon him. Belding recognized his assailant as an old acquaintance and begged for his life, but the Indian drew his knife, circled his crown, jerked off the entire scalp, struck a hatchet into his skull and left him to die. The villagers, alarmed by the gunfire, ran out from the houses and forts, saw the Indians fleeing to the east, fired ineffec- tually upon them, and found young Belding, still conscious and able to tell the story. He was carried to the fort and soon died.
A town whose people could not walk by day through its single street without peril of their lives at the hands of savages had reason for complaint to a government, to whose defence its men had devoted their lives and in support of whose soldiers its women in years past had toiled and deprived themselves. A degree of security was sup- plied by the coming and going of ranging parties on their way up and down the valley but the forts, built by the townspeople's own labor, were as often barren of troops as they were occupied by such inde- pendents as those from Connecticut, sent to go thus far and no farther.
In August word reached Boston that peace had been declared between England and France but there lingered in the Connecticut valley the sense of exposure to attack by Indians who had been turned from harmless neighbors to marauders. There was occasion for such an appeal as Parson Doolittle made in October, setting out that the town was still exposed, "notwithstanding the cessation of arms be- tween England and France." It was answered by the assignment of Sergeant Ebenezer Stratton and fourteen men from Leftenant William Lyman's company from Fort Shirley to do garrison duty at North- field until January. Fort Dummer was to have fifteen men for its defence and five were to stay at Fort Hinsdell. In the main, the people were left to self-support, made difficult by the need of sending down the river for provisions, and to self-defence against whatever blows might fall.
Interest in the proclamation in Boston, May 10, 1749, that a treaty of peace had been signed the previous October at Aix la Chap- pelle centered for the people of the valley upon two points. Would it be the end of Indian warfare; and why should Louisburg, so gloriously won, be ceded back to France? There was none too firm
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confidence that outrages would cease, nor that France had so com- pletely yielded her claims to domination of North America; but that issue could await the developments of the year.
New England's patriots were exasperated by the relinquishment of the Cape Breton stronghold. Well might Parson Doolittle, whose son, Charles, had given up his life in the siege, share the feeling that the sacrifice had been vain if it was to have no more permanent result than a year's tenancy. When he discussed the treaty with Captain Alexander, who had distinguished himself in the Louisburg capture, he might expect sympathy in his dismay, only to find that shrewd veteran complacent-Louisburg was no better than a show of pos- session, a hollow pretense upon which France had spent millions of her treasure without adding a sixpence worth of actual strength. It was a burden to hold and if the King had made peace easier by giving it up he had turned it to better account than he ever could in defence of his realm.
The next month there was answer to the question of peace in the valley following treaties in Europe. A few Indians made an assault on Number Four, others were seen skulking along West River, while on the east side of the Connecticut the shooting of cattle near Fort Hins- dell was evidence of their lingering in the woods.
Events of the sort were quite enough to keep alive the concern of Northfield's people and cause scouting parties, more numerous than had been usual when warfare had more serious aspects, to be kept moving up the valley in uneventful tours. European treaties of peace were without meaning to the Indians so long as scalps had a price, and prisoners a welcome, in Canada. A period of quiet longer than for years gradually assured the settlers that peace was accepted and rewards for their scalps withdrawn.
Out of the war, Northfield came to a realization of the injuries it had suffered, materially and morally. Its manhood had been de- voted through successive seasons to the occupations of warfare of a kind that gave no release from service. Its youth had been absorbed in unproductive tasks and had acquired neither habits nor training for the industry which the needs of the community and its house- holds demanded. Parson Doolittle, watchful of all the town's interests, wrote in his narrative, "Great numbers of our young men enlisted and
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have been kept in pay and idleness, to the ruin of many of them and the hurt of the country." Could the routine of the home life, the bringing back of the neglected fields to production, the development of the resources of the forests and the streams, tough labor with im- plements cruder and harder to wield than muskets, command the same spirit that had showed itself eager in long rangings and the pursuit of a lurking enemy?
Materially, war had worked its usual injury. The whole com- munity had suffered but it had suffered unequally as to its members. The growth of the town had been stunted. Who would come to live in a region so beset by danger and so burdened with the support of garrisons? The difference in wealth, hardly observable in the normal course, when people of like habits and equal opportunities worked at the same tasks, was now marked in the poverty of some households and the plenitude of others. A son of the hero, Benjamin Wright, was so reduced that the mortgage on his lands, held not by neighbors but by money lenders in far-away London, could not be met and his acres must be lost to him. Money lenders at home and shrewd traders meanwhile had profited and fortunes had grown. There were now the rich and the poor.
The reclaiming of titles when the third settlement began had been followed by many transfers from owners who did not return and the estates of those who had died to such as had money to buy, with the result that the equality in land-holding upon which the town was founded had given way to possession of hundreds of acres by certain of the men and a tenantry by non-owners. The years of war had but widened the margin between the shrewd and grasping on the one extreme and the improvident but not less worthy on the other.
If population had been held down by the unattractiveness of an exposed outpost, there had been the fortunate outcome that the people were of one blood and of prevailing kinship. Of the sixty land-owners occupying their homesteads along the main street, which practically constituted the town, there was not one who bore an un- familiar name. None were newer than the first years of the final settle- ment, many of them were linked with the settlements of the previous century and not a few were of the same families as first occupied the town.
Janes, Lyman, Alexander, Wright, Warner, Dickinson were names of first settlers persisting in those of the period of 1750.
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Evens, Belding, Holton, Smith, Moore, Hunt, Root were added to the present list during the second settlement.
Mattoon, Field, Stebbins, Doolittle, Petty, Burt were new only in the sense that they were of the present century.
To so few names would all the present men of the town answer, either in their own stead or that of the wives, and between even these there was a crossing of family lines which kept the town well-nigh completely inter-related.
By the interference of the New Hampshire line as it was run in 1741, the town had lost nearly a third of its territory and a smaller fraction of its population, but the increase in its own families, those living within the village, had fully compensated. As it stood there were hardly more than four hundred people here. The first recorded count, that of 1765, showed a population of 415. Fully two hundred of them were below the age of twenty-one.
It was a town of thronging childhood. Ten babies had been born in the present year. On the evidence of the family Bibles, there were forty-seven under the age of five, ninety-five between that age and fourteen ; under seventeen there were forty-two more; twenty-five more were in the adolescent period short of majority, and unmarried. Assurance of the perpetuity of the blood of the pioneers was given by the presence of twenty Wrights in this array of youth and childhood ; twenty-two carrying the name of Holton; eighteen Fields; eleven Pettys, or as the name was sometimes spelled, Pettees; nine each of Severance and Smith, the Smiths all in one household; eight Mat- toons and seven Lymans.
The case for permanence of the early stock would gain further support in the enumeration of those of this generation who at the moment were of maturer years, not to note those of the blood under other names. A Northfield without Alexanders had never yet been and, it might well be predicted, never would be. The Beldings were many and by marriage were perpetuating the descent of the Hadley Dickinsons and of Captain Benjamin Wright. The Burts, who had come to high place in landed estate, were numerous; in one of their households was carried the five orphans of the Asahel killed by the Indians on the road out of Pauchaug. Six orphans were left by the death of Burt's companion that fatal day, Nathaniel Dickinson, the youngest of whom, Benoni, was born after his father's death; these children had also the heritage of the memory of that Joseph who
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was the bearer of the message from the besieged first settlement and who fell in the battle of Beers Plain.
If the fathers of these numerous families, held to the exploits of war, were indifferent to the education of their children, a disregard it would be unfair to assume, the mothers, dutiful, industrious, patient and as brave as their husbands, were not bearing children to grow up in ignorance. At the least, they must be able to read the Bible. Be- yond that there was the example of men who ably met the require- ments of the detached and self-reliant town in its "prudentials."
Parson Doolittle was a power in this as in all the community's affairs and not the least of his contributions was the intellectual up- bringing of a youth from out of one of the families to be a qualified instructor. He had taken young Seth Field under his instruction and inspiration. Preparing the boy for college he had sent him to his alma mater, Yale, where he was graduated in 1732, the first North- field boy to gain a college degree.
· Seth Field, returning from college at twenty, proved that to gain an education was not to lose aught of the sturdy features of a frontier townsman. His heritage forbade weakness and irresolution. His father had been a captain of brave men in ranging and battle and his mother was the Mary Mattoon who had been taken to Canada in the captive company from Deerfield in 1704, when she was seventeen. His paternal grandfather had been with Turner in the Falls' fight and was killed by the Indians in 1697. One further step in ancestry reached the emigrant founder of the American Field family, one of the pioneers from Dorchester to Hartford under Hooker. Seth joined Captain Kellogg's company, the next year after college, was in mili- tary service throughout the late war, and was still enrolled. Mean- while he was holding town offices but making his distinctive contribu- tion as the town's one schoolmaster.
The schoolhouse built by the town and used for several years was crude and rough but it served its good purpose. Only because it had become too small, the town, in 1748, had provided a new one. It was built in the midst of the war and of necessity was free from extravagant features. It was, of course, placed in the street, recep- tacle for all non-profit-earning devices. It stood near the meeting- house, with the serpentine roadway running on either side. Here the learned master assembled boys of all sizes and bearing such adorning names as Uriah, Eleazer, Waitstill, Experience, Deliverance, and
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Remembrance, while the Old Testament worthies, Moses, Aaron, Abraham and Noah, were represented.
In war-time, there was no thought of the main street being put to other than common use, military, if need be, as a training field and for guard houses, and domestic as a matter of course. Here the cattle could roam and the hogs could root, the home lots being pro- tected by virginia fences, crooked enough, as was observed, so that a pig, rooting out, would only find that he had rooted in. Regularly the sheep, of which there were numerous flocks privately owned, were folded at night, after being driven out during the day under the care of an official shepherd. Blacksmith shops stood within the street and recently the other tradesmen had been given like permits. Opinion was gathering that there should be a better order and, in 1753, the town voted "to clear off the incumbrances and encroach- ments," an ordinance that stopped short of prohibiting occupation by carts and implements or of driving off the animals. It was taken to mean the removal of the varied private structures. The meeting-house and the schoolhouse remained.
In the first days of 1749, the town was stricken by the loss of its spiritual leader, Rev. Benjamin Doolittle. He was mending the fence on his homestead, January 9, when he was seized with a pain in his chest and died within a few minutes. He was in his fifty-fourth year and in the midst of his activities as minister, physician and patriotic leader. As the minister of the town for over thirty years, he was held in full reverence. The doctrinal strife, incited by his liberal views at a time when Jonathan Edwards was providing rigorous tests to belief in New England, had passed but not until it was shown that his people either shared his broader views, as the larger number did, or were tolerant of them in a man of high character and intellect. In his other profession, chirurgery and medicine, he was known to all the people of the valley, his practice reaching all the way from Charlestown, thirty miles to the north to as far down, on occasion, as Springfield. He had been the leading advocate of the town's interests in the re- curring periods of its military neglect at the hands of the colony's government. He had sought the intellectual development of its youth and had trained and sent through college the boy who was the outright critic of the halting military conduct of the General Court, and his letters to the governor were the public expression of the broad vision which was formulated in the Narrative of the wars he had witnessed,
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to be preserved in printed form. "The Boston Gazette and Weekly Journal" was within bounds when it reported, later in the month, that his death brought "inexpressible grief to the town."
Mr. Doolittle was a typical product of the best there was in the New England of its first century. His grandfather, English born, was of that community, New Haven, which had set a definite standard of independence and self-reliance, intellectual and political. His father, John Doolittle, born in New Haven in 1655, one of thirteen children, had helped in founding the town of Wallingford, where Benjamin was born in 1695, one of eight children, of whom six were girls. Graduated from Yale in 1716, he was settled in Northfield two years later, bringing with him his young wife, the daughter of Samuel Todd of New Haven. Of their nine children, the oldest, Oliver, had died but three years before. The second child, Lydia, had married Leftenant John Evens, one of Northfield's leading men. Next, Charles, had lost his life in the siege of Louisburg, where he accom- panied Captain Alexander. Then there were Eunice, wife of Samuel Ashley ; Susanna, wife of the doctor's pupil and follower, Seth Field ; Lucius, who had married a daughter of Deacon Samuel Smith; Chloe, wife of Moses Evens; Lucy, who died young, as had another unmarried child; Thankful, engaged to marry Oliver Willard of Fort Dummer; Anzi, now a boy of thirteen; Lucy, who was nine. There were twelve grandchildren at the time of the doctor's death.
Another Yale man, Isaac Lyman, after preaching here for some months, was offered the minister's place soon after Mr. Doolittle's death, but declined, and still another, John Hubbard of Hartford, was called. Both were of the class of 1747. Mr. Hubbard's probation service was satisfactory and at the March meetin' of 1750 he was given, and accepted, the call. The offer was less sumptuous than the one to Mr. Doolittle. Land was not being so freely distributed as thirty years before and the terms included no real estate. The settle- ment sum was £133, six shillings and eight pence, and the annual salary £66, thirteen shillings and four pence, with promise of "such supply of wood as his family shall stand in need of." This youth of twenty-four came to Northfield a bachelor and remained so in a town of many marriageable girls for four years, when he married Anna, daughter of Captain Samuel Hunt, a leading citizen with large landed estate. Both were in the fourth generation from English emigrants to Connecticut, Anna being also a descendant of Governor Webster.
CHAPTER XX PEACE A GESTURE, NOT A FACT
America, French or English? The Valley Drawn Deeply into the Issue
THE TOWN, having been the product of migration from down the valley and, because of troublous times, the end of this pioneer path, now that the perils of the region were at least reduced and seemingly passed, began to send out promoters of new towns to the north. It had in earlier years supplied the beginnings of the settle- ment which, originally within its bounds, had since 1741 been over the New Hampshire line. Repeatedly the advancers had been driven back to the town but they now renewed their hold on the farms on each side of the Connecticut.
Now that the village had substantial frame houses it was to be expected that the rebuilding almost on the borders of the town would be of the same style, but Cap'n John Stebbins, who like Ensign Samuel Stratton, was about to reclaim his homestead on the west side, held out for log houses. They were just as good to live in and not so sure to die in-when Indians came about.
"Indians, Indians," why all this talk about Indians, when there were none around, and hadn't France laid down her arms? Were white men forever to regulate all their concerns out of consideration for the heathen? To which reasoning, Cap'n Stebbins would rejoin that there had been some surprises in times past when it was sup- posed peace had come permanently; France was still in Canada. Did they not attend to what those Deerfield men who went to Mon- treal with Rainbow had heard said about America belongin' to France? He would point to Colonel Hinsdell as the one settler in the section "beyond the Ashuelot" who had made out to stay there, and did those street folks think one of their board houses would have stood up as his log 'un had? Logs for him, concluded Cap'n.
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